
Class 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSlir 



(H) 



I(esress aii Slavery 



VS. 



progress and poyerty. 



BY Tvl. C. BRIGGS. 



The Single-Tax Theory Shown to be Unjust, 
Impracticable, and Absurd. 






Printed by Hunt & Eaton, 150 Fifth Ave., New York. 



Regress and Slavery 



vs. 



"Progress AND Poverty" 



By M. C. BRIGGS 



THE8INGLE-TAXTHE0RYSH0WN TO BE UNJUST, 
IMPRACTICABLE, AND ABSURD 



( ' 'H! 8 1891' V> ' 

NEW YORK -^ ^-^n.'V ^^- 

PRINTED BY HUNT & EATON 
150 Fifth Avenue 
i8gi 



^'^,p 



Copyright, 1891, by 

M. c. BRiaas, 

Petaluma, Cal. 



REGRESS AND SLAVERY 

VS. 

" PROGRESS AND POVERTY." 



FIRST PAPER. 

A BAD book by a bad man is bad. A bad 
t"ok by c* good man is very bad. The known 
virtues of the author yield sanction and sup- 
port to his errors. 

A good man may write a bad book because 
of unconscious bias, or a tangential impulse 
thrown into his early life, or the lack of special 
knowledge lying outside of his large general 
intelligence, in which case his mistakes are 
dangerously commended by his own known 
information and integrity. Goethe says, 
" Nothing is more terrible than active igno- 
rance." Had he added amiable and ^if the 
reader can pardon the surface contradiction) 



4 Regress and Slavery 

intelligent ignorance, the sentence would have 
been philosophically complete. 

Mr. Henry George has given to the world a 
work entitled Progress and Poverty, It is 
honest, labored, earnest, fallacious, audacious, 
able in its way, impracticable, misleading, mis- 
chievous. Hundreds have read it, and thou- 
sands from them catch and echo fragments 
and fancies, often to the detriment of the au- 
thor, and always to the damagement of truth. 
With perfect respect for the writer, I propose 
to review the book, putting facts into the wit- 
ness-box and trying the case before the court 
of common sense. Facta sunt potentiora ver- 
bis. 

Progress creates new wants. New wants in- 
duce new industries and new methods of old 
industries. 

That growth of science, art, invention, en- 
lightenment, and civil order which we fondly 
call progressive civilization, by adding effi- 
ciency to labor and offering new opportunities 
and incentives to invention, constantly de- 
ranges existing relations and necessitates 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 5 

redistribution of workers with hand and 
brain. 

Thus greatly improved agricultural and 
mechanical machinery enables one to do to- 
day as much as ten or twenty did in the 
yesterdays. Consequently, nine or nineteen 
are thrown out of employment, and the rela- 
tive number of tillers of the soil or toilers in 
the shop is correspondingly lessened. Many 
of us not yet bowed with the weight of incum- 
bent years recall those simpler times when a 
large proportion of our people were small farm- 
ers, and the hoe and the single plow, the hand- 
rake and the sickle, the cradle and the mower's 
scythe furnished food for man and beast. In 
these better days farming, though not exempt 
from the sweat of labor, is well-nigh exalted to 
a fine art. But what is to be done with the 
released hands ? 

Wives and daughters younger than Sojourner 
Truth remember when their grandmothers and 
mothers seeded the cotton, carded and spun 
the wool, drew flaxen threads from the whir- 
ring wheel, and stitched home-made garments 



6 Regress and Slavery 

for rosy girls and boys. These homely pur- 
suits have given place to machinery and the 
skill of experts. But where shall scope be 
found for the disengaged ? 

The tallow-dip yields to oil, oil to gas, and 
gas to lightning ; naked floors hide their rude 
simplicity under tapestry fit for kings, and the 
honest old wash-tub surrenders at discretion 
to an upstart laundry which returns your 
soiled linen, washed, dried, and ironed in 
thirteen minutes by the watch. The ox-cart 
creaks no more, and the old-time stage-coach 
stares abashed at the thundering trains which 
run without weariness and puff without faint- 
ing. The telegraph distances sunlight, and 
men whisper their love by telephone to ears 
half a thousand miles away. If life be meas- 
ured by what is put into it, there are men living 
this blessed morning a thousand years older 
than Methuselah would have been if he had 
haunted this mundane orb nine hundred and 
sixty-nine years longer. 

All these beneficent changes, each in its own 
order and degree, bring temporary confusion. 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 7 

They disturb the industrial balance and cause 
class to jostle class, and make men think 
themselves victims of human injustice when 
they are only subjects of irrepealable and 
uplifting law. 

It is thus that progress works revolutions 
which leave in their wake considerable numbers 
of unemployed, bewildered, discouraged, and 
possibly embittered men, who lend open ears 
to the glib self-styled reformers, too often 
without discriminating between the authentic 
and the spurious. To this list of worthy per- 
sons must be added far less deserving classes, 
such as the supine and thriftless, the indifferent 
and dishonest, the thousands impoverished by 
their own vices, the alarming influx into our 
cities of a low class of foreigners, Utopian 
dreamers, impracticable sporadists to whom 
every thing old is evil, political bummers, and 
the general riffraff whose lives run all to ears 
and stomach. Altogether they present a 
formidable array, ever eager to hear of a patent 
remedy for their ills, the more gorgeously 
unreasonable the better. 



8 Regress and Slavery 

To this immense miscellany of humanity 
some recent authors have addressed them- 
selves with flattering success. To the religiously 
unsettled Robert Elsmere offers 

" A balm for every wound, 
A cordial for [their] fears." 

To the industrially unsettled Bellamy's thin 
but glittering dream and Henry George 's /V^^- 
ress and Poverty are as water to a thirsty soul. 
Let honesty shield me from suspicion of un- 
amiability when I aver that the lucrative wel- 
come given to these three most fallacious books 
of the day is startling proof of the enfeeble- 
ment of popular reason by the avalanche of 
gushy, illogical, unphilosophical, half-lunatic 
literature which stocks our public libraries and 
burdens the center-tables of our homes. 

Time is too valuable to be expended upon 
the ideal commonwealths of earlier dates, such 
as Plato's Republic, Moore's Utopia, Bacon's 
New Altantis,^.nd Campanella's Civitas Solis. 
Nor is it worth while to linger upon that 
brilliant phantasmagoria, Looking Backward, 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 9 

Progress and Poverty is an earnest work, written 
by an honest man with serious intent. To that, 
therefore, as containing all the tangible reasons 
and no reasons of the wide and wild specula- 
tion, this review will be confined. 

Mr. George makes much account of certain 
nice definitions, with respect to which he rather 
boastfully differs from other writers on polit- 
ical economy, such as the difference between 
capital and wealth, paper money and wealth, 
paper money and capital, capital and land, 
interest and revenue, the exact meaning of 
wages, the law of wages, wages and interest, 
the source of wages, etc., etc. These defini- 
tftns and distinctions are doubtless interesting 
to verbalistic political economists, but, practi- 
cally, most of them are of no more value to 
economic life than an assumed difference be- 
tween sunshine and sunbeams, air and atmos- 
phere, water and protoxide of hydrogen. The 
actual affairs of life move on as regularly and 
lawfully without as with them, as is abundantly 
proved by the fact that ninety-nine hundredths 
of the best practical political economists know 



10 Regress and Slavery 

nothing of the refined technics of the book. I 
infer that Mr. George himself attaches no im- 
portance to his improved terminology outside 
of its imagined bearing upon the main idea. 
His revised terms are expletives used to help 
us up to the single-tax theory, which is the 
soul and substance of the entire work. If the 
book fails to bring its readers to an acceptance 
of that theory he will regard it as a failure in- 
deed. I shall be pardoned, therefore, if, like a 
Yankee, I take a short cut and go directly to 
the theory of exclusive land taxation, which 
is the apple of his eye. If that can be shown 
to be unjust, impracticable, and absurd, it would 
be superfluous to examine in detail the argti- 
ment by which it is supported. Robert Hall 
said, ^' One need not eat a whole flitch of bacon 
to learn whether it is tainted." 



vs. " Progress -AND Poverty." n 



SECOND PAPER. 

It is no more than just that one who ad- 
vances a theory should be permitted to state it 
for himself. After rejecting all the cures for 
life's ills heretofore propounded Mr. George 
gives what he confidently names " The True 
Remedy." Beginning with the oft-repeated 
proposition that " land is the source of all 
wealth " (p. 45), and assuming that industrial 
depressions, financial crises, poverty, igno- 
rance, anarchy, degradation, vice, and crime 
all result primarily, chiefly, and necessarily 
from private ownership of land, he proceeds to 
say the following things : 

Page 295 : " We have traced the unequal 
distribution of wealth, which is the curse and 
menace of modern civilization, to the institu- 
tion of private property in land. We have 
seen that as long as this institution exists no 
increase of productive power can permanently 



12 Regress and Slavery 

benefit the masses, but, on the contrary, must 
tend still further to depress their condition. 
We have examined all the remedies short of 
the abolition of private property in land 
which are currently relied on or proposed 
for the relief of poverty and the better dis- 
tribution of wealth, and have found them all 
inefficacious or impracticable. . . . To extir- 
pate poverty, to make wages what justice 
commands they should be — the full earnings 
of the laborer — we must therefore substitute 
for the individual ownership of land a com- 
mon ownership. Nothing else will go to the 
cause of the evil; in nothing else is there the 
slightest hope. This, then, is the remedy for 
the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth 
apparent in modern civilization and for all 
the evils which flow from it. We must make 
land common property T 

Page 303 : " Whatever may be said for the 
institution of private property in land, it is 
therefore plain that it cannot be defended on 
the score of justice." 

Page 321 : " Private ownership of land is the 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 13 

nether millstone. Material progress is the 
upper millstone. Between them, with an 
increasing pressure, the working classes are 
being ground." 

Page 304: ''There is on earth no power 
which can rightfully make a grant of private 
ownership in land. . . . Let the parchments 
be ever so many, or possession ever so long, 
nature and justice can recognize no right in 
one man to the possession and enjoyment of 
land that is not equally the right of all his 
fellows." 

Page 305 : " The wide-spreading social evils 
which every-where oppress men amid advanc- 
ing civilization spring from a great primary 
wrong — the appropriation, as the exclusive 
property of some men, of the land on which 
and from which all must live. From this 
fundamental injustice flow all the injustices 
which distort and endanger modern develop- 
ment, which condemn the producer of wealth 
to poverty and pamper the non-producer in 
luxury, which rear the tenement-house with 
the palace, plant the brothel behind the 



14 Regress and Slavery 

church, and compel us to build prisons as we 
open new schools." 

Pages 307, 308: "To improvements such 
an original title can be shown ; but it is a title 
only to the improvements, and not to the land 
itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or 
fill a morass, all I can justly claim is the value 
given by these exertions. They give me no 
right to the land itself, no claim other than to 
my equal share with every other member of 
the community in the value which is added to 
it by the growth of the community. But it 
will be said there are improvements which 
in time become indistinguishable from the 
land itself. Very well ; then the title to the 
improvements becomes blended with the title 
to the land ; the individual right is lost in the 
common right. . . . Thu^ the value of land 
expresses in exact and tangible form the right 
of the community in land held by an indi- 
vidual ; and rent expresses the exact amount 
which the individual should pay to the com- 
munity to satisfy the equal rights of all other 
members of the community. Thus if we con- 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 15 

cede to priority of possession the undisturbed 
use of land, confiscating rent for the benefit 
of the community, we reconcile the fixity of 
tenure which is necessary for improvement 
with a full and complete recognition of the 
equal rights of all to the use of land." 

Mr. George claims that the government 
might rightly and righteously assume title to 
all land without a thought of compensating 
those who have purchased it from that same 
government. In opposing the plan of com- 
pensation advocated by Herbert Spencer and 
John Stuart Mill he delivers himself with 
refreshing freedom. Thus on pages 326-328, 
*' By the time the people of any such country 
as England or the United States are suffi- 
ciently aroused to the injustice and disad- 
vantages of individual ownership of land to 
induce them to attempt its nationalization, 
they will be sufficiently aroused to nationalize 
it in a much more direct and easy way than 
by purchase. They will not trouble them- 
selves about compensating the proprietors of 
land. ... If the land of any country belongs 



1 6 Regress and Slavery 

to the people of that country, what right, in 
morality and justice, have the individuals 
called land-owners to the rent ? . . . Why not 
make short work of the matter anyhow?" 

Mr. George shows occasional symptoms of a 
fear that the " shock " of so unique a revolution 
might prove inconveniently severe. Read him 
on pages 362-364: 

" We have weighed every objection, and 
seen that neither on the ground of equity nor 
expediency is there any thing to deter us 
from making the land common property by 
confiscation. But the question of method re- 
mains. We should satisfy the laws of justice, 
we should meet all economic requirements by 
at one stroke abolishing all private titles, de- 
claring all land public property, and letting it 
out to the highest bidder in lots to suit, under 
such conditions as would sacredly guard the 
private right to improvements. . . . But such 
a plan, though perfectly feasible, does not seem 
to me the best. Or, rather, I propose to 
accomplish the same thing in a simpler, easier, 
and quieter way than that of formally confis- 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 17 

eating all the land and formally letting it out 
to the highest bidder. To do that would 
involve a needless shock to present customs 
and habits of thought, which is to be avoided. 
To do that would involve a needless exten- 
sion of governmental machinery, which is to 
be avoided. ... I do not propose either to 
purchase or to confiscate private property in 
land. The first would be unjust, the second 
needless. Let the individuals who now hold 
it still retain, if they want to, possession of 
what they are pleased to call their land. Let 
them continue to call it their land. Let them 
buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. 
We may safely leave them the shell if we take 
^ the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate the 
land ; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. . . . 
We already take some rent in taxation. We 
have only to make some changes in our mode 
of taxation to take it all. What I therefore 
propose is the simple yet sovereign remedy, 
which is to raise wages, increase the earnings 
of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish pov- 
erty, give lucrative employment to whoever 
2 



1 8 Regress and Slavery 

wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, 
lessen crime, elevate morals and taste and 
intelligence, purify government, and carry civ- 
ilization to yet nobler heights, is — to appro- 
priate rent by taxation. In this way the State 
may become the universal landlord without 
calling herself so, and without assuming a sin- 
gle new function. In form the ownership of 
land would remain as now. No owner of land 
need be dispossessed, and no restriction need 
be placed upon the amount of land any one 
could hold. For rent being taken by the 
State in taxes, land, no matter in whose name 
it stood, would be really common property, 
and every member of the community would 
participate in the advantages of its ownership. 
Now, as the taxation of rent or land values 
must necessarily be increased just as we abol- 
ish other taxes, we may put the proposition 
into practical form by proposing to abolish all 
taxes save that upon land^ 

Such is the theory of the '' single tax." 
The State must own the land, the land must 
pay its full rental value in taxes to the '^ com- 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 19 

munity" or ''the State," all other forms of 
wealth to remain forever untaxed. 

If the gifted author would kindly tell us 
whom this majestic " we " represents — what 
parties are comprehended under that capa- 
cious pronoun which vaults li'ghtly over ob- 
stacles which thinking men must see to be 
insuperable under our form of government, and 
deprecable and despicable under any form, he 
would do us a kindness. Community, too, as 
used by him, needs a severer definition. If 
** we " are to take the ''kernel," precisely 
what members of the national family are to 
enjoy that luxury ? The " we " that takes 
some, and modestly proposes to take all, ought 
to disclothe itself of all ambiguity, and give 
the poor " hayseeds " a fair look at the mouth 
which is to swallow them. 

Soberly, so full a statement of the single-tax 
fanc}^ has been given, first, that the author 
may be justly dealt with ; second, that all 
may know what it is ; third, that it may re- 
fute itself. 



20 Regress and Slavery 



THIRD PAPER. 

In the problem under view there are so many 
elements which, for the sake of such readers as 
have not found special occasion to think on such 
themes, it may be profitable to set in order. 

I, One of the broad fallacies which under- 
gird the scheme of Progress and Poverty is 
the assumption that wealth inheres in and 
springs spontaneously from the land. 

There is no more wealth in land itself and 
alone than in electricity, gravitation, or moon- 
light. Wealth, in all its comforts, comple- 
ments, and combinations, shapes and shades, 
moods and tenses, is the product of thought- 
directed energy. It is a product of mind. In 
any and every sense above the nakedest ani- 
mal existence, in regions where spontaneous 
growths fill human stomachs — if even there an 
exception should be conceded — wealth is the 
product of thinking toilfully. 



vs. *' Progress and Poverty." 21 

Thus two men enter alike on lands of equal 
fertility, with equal strength and opportunities. 
One grows rich and influential ; the other re- 
mains as poor as the turkey which tradition 
declares followed Job through his fallen fort- 
unes. Stanley traversed millions of acres of 
land as fat as Eden, clothed with forests of 
valuable timber, beautified by crystal streams, 
in sight of mountains rich in minerals, yet 
trodden for indefinite ages by naked and com- 
fortless savages. Digger Indians owned the 
rivers and mountains of California long enough 
before keener eyes detected the witching glit- 
ter that set the world agog. The rich and the 
poor, the thrifty and the thriftless, the moral 
and the impure, the noble and the ignoble, are 
found side by side among owners and tillers 
of the soil. 

2. The book appears to ignore the vital sim- 
ilarity in fundamental conditions between the 
products of commerce and mechanical skill and 
the fruits of agricultural and horticultural toil. 

Two young men set out in life together. 
One chooses mechanics and the other takes 



22 Regress and Slavery 

to farm life. If one lounges idly in his shop, 
and the other will not plow by reason of the 
cold, both will beg in harvest and have noth- 
ing. But let the one improve his skill and 
ply his tools, and the other clear, fence, under- 
drain, plow, sow, reap, and, by exchanges 
mutually profitable, both will have bread 
enough and to spare. Where lies the funda- 
mental difference between them, as to the 
rightfulness of private ownership ? One builds 
a shop and makes tables, say. Practically the 
trade is of no value without the shop, the shop 
is of no value without material and tools, the 
tools and material are of no value without in- 
dustrial use. The other buys honest acres 
from " the State," erects buildings, constructs 
fences, purchases implements. Practically the 
land is valueless without fences and buildings, 
fences and buildings are valueless without im- 
plements, implements are valueless without 
industrial use. Which of the two has the su- 
perior right to the safety and satisfaction of 
private ownership ? The results in both cases 
are products of thoughtful industry. 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 23 

*^ No, no," says Progress and Poverty. " The 
mechanic makes his wealth ; the farmer's 
grows.'' Did the mechanic make the timber 
and the iron, and the marble and the brass, 
and the glue-stock and the coal ? " No, but 
he adapted the material to convenient uses." 
Exactly ; and how came -the farmer's crops ? 
Did they grow up some dark morn like Topsy, 
all of themselves ? Which employed most and 
hardest toil? Between the two the farmer 
has had more work and more care. Is it, 
then, in their mutual dependency to be a com- 
mon ownership throughout? " O, never," 
says Progress and Poverty. " The farmer has no 
right or partnership interest in the mechanic's 
shop and tools and tables; but the mechanic 
has as much and as many rights in the farm- 
er's farm as the farmer himself has." 

But the improvements belong to the farmer. 
The building, the hedges, the subsoiling, the 
under-drainage, the cellars, the wells, the or- 
chards, the vineyards, the asparagus-beds, the 
seeded timothy meadows and wide clover 
fields belong to John the farmer, and Jim the 



24 Regress and Slavery 

mechanic is so far shut out by undisputed 
private ownership. 

Wrong again. If " there are improvements 
which in time become indistinguishable (or in- 
separable) from the land, . . . then the title 
to the improvements becomes blended with the 
title to the land ; the individual right is lost in 
the common right." And John, after his years of 
hard labor and weary waiting, must try to con- 
sole himself with the reflection that he and 
the laziest tramp alike have a sixty-five mill- 
ionth interest in the '' common ownership " of 
that farm and its " indistinguishable '' improve- 
ments. He will surely be content with that ! 
- Mr. George would urge that the justice of 
this one-sided arrangement arises from the 
fact that it is the growth of community that 
adds value to land, whether the land be used 
to supply the sumptuary market or for city 
lots ; and therefore the community has a right 
to the increase of value dependent on the 
growth of population. 

But is land the only thing the value of which 
is enhanced by the increase of inhabitants ? 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 25 

Let us see. A man builds a store, shop, mill, 
elevator, railroad, theater, school-house, upon 
an uninhabited plain. What is the value of 
these products of labor? They are worthless. 
The land, being less destructible and more 
capable of yielding food to the owner, is less 
dependent than other species of property upon 
community. Indeed, the great increase of 
value of land in a populous city results from 
the fact that population so greatly enhances 
the value of stores, offices, shops, mills, banks, 
theaters, etc., erected upon it. The land 
shares but moderately and by consequence in 
the greatly improved opportunities brought to 
commerce, manufacture, exchange, and art, by 
large and contiguous numbers of patrons. So 
great are these advantages to multiform enter- 
prises that men find it more profitable to rent 
the land than to purchase it, as capital brings 
quicker and larger returns invested in trade 
than in the ground on which the palaces of 
trade stand. A lot on Broadway, New York, 
is worth three thousand dollars a front foot, 
and rents for fifty thousand a year ; but an 



26 Regress and Slavery 

eight-story building on it accommodates a 

/ business which yields an income of a million 
a year. Where then is the justice of taxing 
the landlord to pay for governmental protec- 
tion and opportunities to enrich the lessee? 
And where is the equity of wresting from 
the lot-owner the full rental value while the 

' man who grows rich upon it pays nothing?; 
Thus the unlucky owner is robbed both of 
ownership and of rent, and left with only 
the care of an estate, which he must manage 
without so much as the compensation of a 

, hireling. 

\ '' But you do not get the whole case," says 
Progress mtd Poverty. "Let the individuals 
who hold it still retain, if they want to, pos- 
session of what they are pleased to call their 
land. Let them buy and sell and bequeath 
and devise it," and of course cultivate and use 
it in their own way. 

What now ! Has the snake swallowed it- 
self? Has the prudence which seeks to avoid 
** shocks " taken the spinal marrow out of 
the ''True Remedy?" If no limit is to be 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 27 

set to the area which one may hold, and the 
holder may buy, sell, bequeath, and devise, 
where is the relief to the laboring classes? 
Tax the holder the full rental value, and you 
force upon him the strongest motive to cut 
down the wages of his hired help. Either he 
must be content to toil for a mere and pre- 
carious living — precarious because of the un- 
certainty of seasons, crops, and markets — or 
abandon the land to the grasp and greed of a 
robber government, or reduce the expense of 
production to the lowest possible figure. Thus 
the *' True Remedy " reaches a lame and im- 
potent conclusion which retains all the possible 
evils of private ownership, with a greatly ag- 
gravated incentive to oppress the hireling in 
his wages. How such an arrangement is to 
" increase wages, extirpate pauperism, abolish 
poverty, lessen crime, elevate morals, purify 
government, and carry civilization to yet no- 
bler heights," is one of the puzzles which must 
be relegated to minds of abnormal cast. To 
carry such a scheme into effect it would be 
necessary to extend the functions of the con- 



28 Regress and Slavery 

templated paternal government to all the mi- 
nutiae of tillage and land management, and 
appoint a supervising and enforcing func- 
tionary for every hundred or two of hus- 
bandmen. 



vs. '* Progress and Poverty." 29 



FOURTH PAPER. 

3. In advocating his scheme of exclusive 
land taxation Mr. George appears strangely in- 
cognizant of the ground-reasons by which taxa- 
tion must be justified. To maintain order, 
protect the individual in his person, pursuits, 
and possessions, and provide public institu- 
tions for the general good are the objects of 
government and the prime conditions of pro- 
gressive civilization. To maintain government 
for such ends all right-minded citizens are 
willing to be equitably taxed. They regard 
money paid in reasonable taxes as a wise and 
profitable investment. Even a bad govern- 
ment is better than none, and a good one is a 
priceless boon to all who live peacefully under 
its sway. And when a government provides 
in its structural plan peaceable remedies, such 
as free speech, a free press, a free forum, a 
free pulpit, and a free ballot, for real or fancied 



30 Regress and Slavery 

evils, an attempt at violent and treasonable 
overthrow is beyond the reach of possible ex- 
tenuation. To tax a people in a just way for 
the maintenance of a just and wholesome rep- 
resentative government is a policy so obviously 
wise and necessary that dissidents imperil their 
reputation for candor and common sense by de- 
claiming against it. But the tax must be levied 
upon all who need protection. The land- 
owner needs it to guarantee and defend his 
title and assure him the peaceable enjoyment 
of the fruits of his toil. Very quickly does 
feeble and capricious government show itself 
in neglected, half-tilled, and abandoned farms. 
In parts of Central America I have seen miles 
on miles of abandoned ranches. There are the 
cactus hedges, the long avenues of stately 
flowering trees, and the hacienda buildings 
in various stages of decay, where the soil 
is exhaustlessly fertile and the fructifying 
sun quickens every seed committed to the 
ground. Bad government is the explana- 
tion. The people are thriftless because un- 
confident. Enterprise is discouraged, and 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 31 

uncertainty hangs like a pall upon the spirits 
of men. 

But if the land-owner needs the strong arm 
of the State, the merchant, the manufacturer, 
the banker, the ship-master need it still more. 
Mr. George will not consent to call bonds and 
greenbacks capital; but, name as you will, 
they shrink to nothingness under a constantly 
alarming prospect of revolution. Had our 
" erring brothers '* of the South achieved a 
final triumph our bonds would have been as 
worthless as Confederate notes are to-day. 
And all other kinds of wealth and capital 
shrink and shrivel under the same law. Why 
then should the land-owner pay for the pro- 
tection of the ship-master, merchant, manu- 
facturer, broker, bond-holder? Even-handed 
justice requires that all who are assured by 
and dependent on civil stability and protection 
should help to pay for them. 

Land-owners are at this date bending under 
burdens which threaten to crush them. Agri- 
culture is depressed. Owners of city lots — 
less affected than tillers — in our new cities are 



32 Regress and Slavery 

struggling under heavy taxes for improve- 
ments. The single-tax scheme would leave 
them all helplessly and hopelessly poor. Land- 
ownership or occupancy would be shunned as 
an irritating and profitless thing. All other 
ventures and investments would be crowded 
to suffocation. Production would fall below 
the demands of consumption, and starvation 
look in at all doors, unless government should 
be clothed with power to compel a sufficient 
number, like serfs of the soil, to plow and 
sow that non-producers might eat and live. 

If the needs of individual life and private 
business justify general taxation there are 
public institutions, such as common schools, 
highways, bridges, court-houses, asylums, 
which are of contingent interest to every 
member of the body politic, and yet can be 
supported only by governmental outlay of funds 
supplied by taxation. Interests so common 
imply a common obligation. The amount 
levied under a fair system to support a good 
government is inconsiderable compared with 
the advantages it affords. 



vs. *' PPxOgress and Poverty." 33 

4, Progress and Poverty wholly ignores a 
most important and beneficent fact in the in- 
dustrial problem, namely, That the causes 
which lesse7t the relative demand for hands in 
one industry are features of a wide general 
sweep of progress which creates new industries 
faster than the old are overstocked or supplanted. 

Thus, if petroleum displaces whale-oil, the 
petroleum industry needs more men than are 
dismissed from the whalers. If gas dims the 
light of petroleum, it also offers employment 
compensative of the loss in the superseded 
work. Electricity in its turn supersedes gas, 
and thousands find use for themselves in that 
ever-growing necessity of economic life. In- 
creasing wealth opens doors of profitable op- 
portunity for improved architecture and dec- 
orative art. A log-cabin for the pioneer could 
be built by five men in a day or two. The 
affluent " settler " moves out of the log-house 
into a building which requires ten men for 
ten months in the building, and possibly as 
many more to furnish and decorate. Afflu- 
ence and taste must needs be gratified with 



34 Regress and Slavery 

paintings, statuary, and music, and the ground, 
erst adorned with corn and cabbages, now 
blushes with every shape and shade of beauty 
under the gardener's skill. These are a few near- 
at-hand samples of an evolution which is leaving 
some old occupations to history and scaring 
men with visions of starvation. Yet as one door 
is shut another and wider opens. There is 
always work enough for the earnest, the skilled, 
and the faithful. Labor leagues, which hand- 
icap the skilled and conscientious with the 
embarrassing weight of the unskilled, unconsci- 
entious, and dissipated, embarrass the situation, 
and time is needed to adjust the new conditions 
and correlations of the economic trend ; but the 
law holds that authentic progress creates more 
de^nand than it extinguishes. Who sighs for a 
return to the sickle and hoe, the hand-rake and 
flail, the distaff and spinning-wheel, the ox-cart 
and stage-coach ? If there are any outside the 
lunatic asylum who would annihilate the fruits 
of inventive genius and relegate to desuetude 
the splendid tokens of material advancement, 
let them speak, for them only have I offended. 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 35 



FIFTH PAPER. 

5. The choice of occupations is voluntary ^ and 
regulated by adaptation^ taste ^ occasion^ and pros- 
pective profits. 

Progress and Poverty appears to assume that 
men are forced into uncomfortable and un- 
profitable employments by the fact that they 
have not access to land. As to this country, 
the assumption is gratuitous and grossly un- 
true. Our cities are thronged — I was near 
saying infested — with youths from country 
homes who seek more genteel and lucrative 
occupations than farming. The professions 
are crowded for similar reasons. It is purely 
a matter of choice. Not a few who are able 
to command means prefer to invest them in 
merchandise, manufactures, stocks, ships, or 
inventions, rather than in land. The slow 
gains and callous hands of tillage fail to capti- 
vate the youthful fancy ; nor are city lots sure 



36 Regress and Slavery 

enough of rapid appreciation to encourage out- 
lay in that direction. Thousands in the south- 
ern counties of CaHfornia are learning the 
bitter lesson that land speculations and booms 
are sometimes boomerangs. Many would 
snatch eagerly at an opportunity to get back 
half the cost of their bepraised acres. 

Possibly a farmer may be found whose five 
or more sons elect farming as their life-work ; 
but such a case would be exceptional even in 
the newer parts of the national domain. The 
rule runs the other way. 

6. Dissipation, ignorance, poverty, and vice 
are not effects of the private owiterskip of land. 
The opposite assumption, which runs through 
and through Progress and Poverty, reverses the 
verdict of history and audaciously belies candid 
observation. The very reverse of the propo- 
sition is so nakedly true that one wonders at 
the fatuity which dares to call it in question. 

I mean to say that dissipation, voluntary 
ignorance, idleness, and vice prevent men from 
owning land or prospering in any thing. Look 
in at the doors of saloons, visit the resorts of 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 37 

Sabbath-breakers, count the hangers about in 
city and country-side, and see if you can make 
yourself believe that these loafers and bummers, 
these bloated and vicious, are all poor fellows 
who, but for the fact that Smith and Brown 
worked, saved, and bought land, would have 
been as wise as sages and as virtuous as saints ! 
The naked petitio of the book is entitled to 
notice only because of its earnest, endless, and 
audacious iteration. 

If all the land were owned under the exclu- 
sive tax-scheme the idle could rent it in par- 
cels and be much better off than the owners, 
for while, by Mr. George's plan, the full rental 
value would go to the State, the owner, besides 
getting nothing, would have the care and cost 
of repairs and general management. 

It is not true that in this country there is a 
scarcity of land. 

Improved hill farms in New Hampshire and 
Vermont are selling for a fraction of the cost 
of the improvements. 

In 1886-88 the patents issued for govern- 
ment lands averaged thirty thousand a year. 



38 Regress and Slavery 

In 1889 more than seventy thousand were 
issued, and the entries kept pace with the 
patents. 

Up to last June one half of the two Dakotas 
was unentered. In several other States settle- 
ments are outrunning government surveys. 

In Idaho only about one seventh of the 
State is surveyed. 

Vast tracts are being purchased from the 
Indians. 

More than twenty million acres, forfeited by 
railroad corporations, are suspended, and only 
await congressional action to open them to 
settlement. 

There are so-called desert lands, only need- 
ing practicable irrigation, enough in extent to 
support the entire present population of our 
country. 

A large part of the land now under private 
ownership is not utilized, and a very small part 
of the cultivated tracts is brought up to its 
highest capacity. 

In the Southern and South-western States are 
extensive and fertile areas held at low prices. 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 39 

I confidently submit that such facts outweigh 
the too hasty generalizations of the esteemed 
author of Progress and Poverty. The resources 
of the United States and Territories are ample 
to feed, house, and clothe the entire present 
population of the planet, and all the'Old World 
countries have yet open space ; and South 
America has immense stretches of fertile soil 
in its virgin state eagerly inviting landless mill- 
ions to come and till and eat. Mexico, our 
next-door neighbor, is lonely for inhabitants 
and offers millions of acres for a bagatelle. 

Mr. George's stand-point appears always to 
be within eye-shot of the landed estates of in- 
sular and continental Europe, which were never 
bought nor earned, but given by caprice to the 
tools and favorites of royalty and preserved 
intact by laws of primogeniture and entail. 
True, that which was wrong at the beginning 
cannot be made right by lapse of time. Yet 
his patent remedy, with its fatal self-negation, 
would afford no relief to the poor even there. 
In this country conditions are wholly different. 
Every acre has been bought of government, 



40 Regress and Slavery 

earned by reclamation and other improvements, 
or given in small tracts for military service. 
Large estates, with no laws of primogeniture 
and entail to preserve them, are broken up in 
the second and third generation. The sons of 
the rich become poor and the sons of the poor 
rich. The wheel of fortune is evermore carry- 
ing up and carrying down. 

Even in the old and densely peopled divis- 
ions of the earth there is room. I borrow 
statistics from Progress and Poverty, sure that 
the author will not dispute his own figures. 
On page loi we have these figures: "Accord- 
ing to the estimates of MM. Behm and Wagner 
the population of India is but 132 to the square 
mile, and that of China 119, whereas Saxony 
has 442, England 422, the Netherlands 291, 
Italy 234, and Japan 233. There are thus in 
both countries [India and China] large areas 
unused or not fully used ; but even in their 
more densely populated districts there can be 
no doubt that either could maintain a much 
greater population in a much higher degree of 
comfort, for in both countries is labor applied 



vs. '* Progress and Poverty." 41 

to production in the rudest and most inefficient 
way, and in both countries great natural re- 
sources are wholly neglected." 

One of the large islands of Japan is very 
thinly inhabited. Africa, an old land, is still 
virgin and offers immense opportunities to 
enterprise and philanthropy. Stanley estimates 
that every one of the seven millions of our 
colored people could find a good-sized farm in 
the wide, rich, well-watered, salubrious wilder- 
ness which he traversed between the eastern 
borders of the Congo Free State and the Albert 
Nyanza. Frenchmen are now proving that 
even Sahara can be made to blossom as the 
rose. 

Such facts as these, I again submit, ought to 
relieve any sense of suffocation we may have 
experienced from a fancied want of room. 
Facts are stronger than fancies. 



42 Regress and Slavery 



SIXTH PAPER. 

7. Mr. George makes no account of the vital 
hearing zvhich different types of government must 
have on the practicability of stick a scheme as he 
advocates. 

In a severe analysis there are but three kinds 
of government — namely, kinghood, priesthood, 
and manhood. All shapes and shades between 
are of the nature of varieties, not species. 
Each type grows from some germinant idea, 
some commanding seed-thought, and builds 
about the central principle institutions suited 
to its nature. Hence what is practicable under 
one form may prove wholly impracticable and 
disruptive under another. 

The American government is of the manhood 
sort. It is ''of the people, by the people, for 
the people," All legislation, all exhibitions of 
executive force, all armaments, are not for 
the prince or the priest, but for the man. 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 43 

Hence the wide distribution of the suffrage, 
the freedom of press, pulpit, and forum, the 
common-school provision for universal educa- 
tion, the rule of majorities, and, in a word, the 
impressive and unquestioned recognition of a 
divine and universal endowment of " inalien- 
able rights, among which are life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness." 

"The State is all of us." The fundamental 
government is all of us. Original power, under 
God, lodges with the people. Functional gov- 
ernment, consisting of presidents, congresses, 
courts, constabulary, is a thing of convenience, 
a medium through which the fundamental 
government administers by the authority and 
will of the people. It can never rise above the 
source of its authority, nor for any considerable 
length of time sink below it. The technical 
government, therefore, in its structural plan 
and actual working, is a true index of the 
average intelligence and ethical stamina of the 
millions. 

Under such a system there must exist great 
freedom of individual choice. Men choose 



44 Regress and Slavery 

their callings, politics, and parties. They 
cannot be assigned and classified, transferred 
by sale or caprice of masterhood, located and 
employed like serfs of the soil, or impressed 
into service for wars of conquest, or shipped in 
the national navy nolens volens. What, there- 
fore, might be done in the way of raising discrim- 
inating taxes under a tyranny can never be 
accomplished here without revolution, blood- 
shed, and the annihilation of the freedom in 
which we glory. 

There are governmental methods so narrow, 
so personal, so absolute in the power of life and 
death, as to suggest the possibility of the con- 
tinued and adequate cultivation of the soil under 
the single-tax idea. Mr. George (pages 368, 
369) states very mixedly and with capricious 
application a sound principle of governmental 
economy. Speaking of production, he says: 
*' This checking of production is, in a greater 
or less degree, characteristic of most of the 
taxes by which the revenues of modern govern- 
ments are raised. All taxes upon manufactures, 
all taxes upon commerce, all taxes upon capital. 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 45 

all taxes upon improvements, are of this kind. 
Their tendency is the same as that of Mo- 
hammed All's tax on date-trees, though their 
effect may not be so clearly seen. All such 
taxes have a tendency to reduce production of 
wealth, and should, therefore, never be resorted 
to when it is possible to raise money by taxes 
which do not check production." 

More clearly stated and more justly applied, 
the principle is this : Unequal and oppressive 
taxation tends to diminish production, and, 
especially with respect to useful and necessary 
products, will never be resorted to by a wise 
and just government. 

Let us see how this principle applies to the 
products which labor brings forth from the 
soil. Here, again, I will consent to be indebted 
to Mr. George for facts which refute his 
favorite theory. Thus on pages 101-103 he 
quotes with approval and comments with con- 
fidence as follows: 

" In India from time immemorial the work- 
ing classes have been ground down by exac- 
tions and oppressions into a condition of 



46 Regress and Slavery 

hopeless and helpless degradation. For ages 
and ages the cultivator of the soil has es- 
teemed himself happy if, of his produce, 
the extortion of the strong hand left him 
enough to support life and furnish seed. 
Capital could nowhere be safely accumulated 
or to any considerable extent be used to assist 
production. Is it not clear that this tyranny 
and insecurity have produced the want and 
starvation of India ; and not, as according to 
Buckle, the pressure of population upon sub- 
sistence that has produced the want, and the 
want the tyranny? Says the Rev. William 
Tennant, a chaplain in the service of the East 
India Company, writing in 1796, two years be- 
fore the publication of the Essay on Population : 
' When we reflect upon the great fertility of 
Hindustan it is amazing to consider the fre- 
quency of famine. It is evidently not owing 
to any sterility of soil or climate ; the evil 
must be traced to some political cause, and it 
requires but little penetration to discover it in 
the avarice and extortion of the various gov- 
ernments. The great spur to industry, that 



vs. " Progress and Poverty/* 47 

of security, is taken away. Hence no man 
raises more grain than is barely sufficient for 
himself, and the first unfavorable season pro- 
duces famine. The Mogul government at no 
period offered full security to the prince, still 
less to his vassals, and to the peasants the 
most scanty protection of all. It was a con- 
tinual tissue of violence and insurrection, 
treachery and punishment, under which neither 
commerce nor arts could prosper, nor agri- 
culture assume the appearance of a system. . . . 
The rents to government w^ere, and, where 
natives rule, still are, levied twice a year by a 
merciless banditti under the semblance of an 
army, who wantonly destroy or carry off what- 
ever part of the produce may satisfy their 
caprice or satiate their avidity.' . . . 

" To this merciless rapacity, which would 
have produced want and famine were the pop- 
ulation but one to a square mile, and the land 
a garden of Eden, succeeded, in the first era of 
British rule in India, as merciless a rapacity 
backed by a far more irresistible power. . . . 

" Upon horrors that Macaulay thus but 



48 Regress and Slavery 

touches, the vivid eloquence of Burke throws a 
stronger Hght : * Whole districts surrendered to 
the unrestrained cupidity of the worst of human 
kind, poverty-stricken peasants fiendishly tort- 
ured to compel them to give up their little 
hoards, and once populous tracts turned into 
deserts.' " 

On page 105 Mr. George ingenuously adds: 
" In other parts [of India], where the rent is 
still taken by the State in the shape of a land- 
tax, assessments are so high, and taxes are col- 
lected so relentlessly, as to drive the ryots 
[farmers], who get but the most scanty living 
in good seasons, into the claws of money- 
lenders, who are, if possible, more rapacious 
than the zemindars." 

Again, pages 105, 106, Mr. George quotes 
from Florence Nightingale : '^ The saddest 
sight to be seen in the East — nay, probably in 
the whole world — is the peasants of our East- 
ern empire." And Mr. George adds: "She 
goes on to show the cause of the terrible fam- 
ines, in taxation which takes from the culti- 
vators the very means of cultivation, and the 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 49 

actual slavery to which the ryots are reduced as 
the consequence of our laws, producing in the 
most fertile country in the world a grinding, 
chronic semi-starvation in many places where 
what is called famine does not exist." 

Page 380, from Mrs. Fawcett : '* In a great 
part of India the land is owned by the govern- 
ment, and therefore the land-tax is rent paid 
directly to the State. The economic perfection 
of this system of tenure may be readily per- 
ceived." So we think ! and the more clearly 
perceived the more intensely abhorred. 

Thus, in zealously attacking the theory of 
Malthus, Mr. George lays a perilous stock 
of dynamite underneath his own. 

It would be easy to add Burma and Daho- 
mey and parts of Russia to India to darken the 
picture of oppression and desolation wrought 
by exclusive and excessive land-tax, where 
nothing less than the life-and-death power 
of rulers could compel the crushed peas- 
ants to produce food enough for daily con- 
sumption. The noblest and fundamental 
industry on which prosperity and life itself 



50 Regress and Slavery 

depend is thus crippled, discouraged, and put 
to shame. 

These gloomy pictures are but foreshadows 
of facts under which the tillers of our own soil 
would groan if power were given to the gov- 
ernment to enforce the single-tax theory. 
Happily such a power does not exist ; and 
therefore such a theory can never take effect 
till the freedom of our representative Republic 
gives place to hereditary monarchy or oligarchy 
clothed with the power of life and death. 
Until then the " peasants " of America will 
constitute a powerful part of the common- 
wealth of freedom, and will neither clamor for 
nor submit to unequal and unjust taxation. The 
waves of Boston Harbor still taste of tea. 



vs. ''Progress and Poverty." 51 



SEVENTH PAPER. 

Mr. George proposes that land-owners shall 
not only be taxed to defray the entire running 
expenses of the government, but also to pro- 
vide for immense outlays for improvements on 
a scale of grandeur heretofore unknown. Thus 
on page 365 : " It will be necessary, where 
rent exceeds the present governmental rev- 
enues, to commensurately increase the amount 
demanded in taxation, and to continue this in- 
crease as society progresses and rent advances." 

Again, page 410: ''There would be a great 
and increasing surplus revenue from the taxa- 
tion of land values ; for material progress, 
which would go on with greatly accelerated 
rapidity, would tend constantly to increase 
rent. This revenue arising from the common 
property could be applied to the common 
benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We 
might not establish public tables — they would 



$2 Regress and Slavery 

be unnecessary ; but we would establish pub- 
lic baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture- 
rooms, music and dancing halls, theaters, uni- 
versities, technical schools, shooting-galleries, 
playgrounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light, 
and motive-power, as well as water, might be 
conducted through our streets at public ex- 
pense ; our roads be lined with fruit-trees ; 
discoverers and inventors rewarded ; scientific 
investigations supported, and in a thousand 
ways the public revenues made to foster efforts 
for the pubhc benefit." 

There you have it in a nutshell. All capital, 
commerce, banks, mills, manufactories, ships, 
railroads, left untaxed. The vast majority 
left scot-free of taxation and munificently sup- 
plied with luxuries, all at the expense of the 
land-owners, a minority, and, taken as a 
whole, the hardest worked and poorest paid 
and least benefited class in the body politic. 
If that is justice give us tyranny. The 
vast body of land sold by the State is owned 
by small farmers, who are under such pressure 
that Senator Stanford is now pressing upon] 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 53 

Congress a measure of relief in the form of a 
bill authorizing the government to loan them 
money at two per cent., to release them fromj 
the grasp of the Shylock capitalists whom Mrj 
George would tenderly release from the bur-j 
den of taxation. 

Mr. George will find it easy to remind us 
that the American government is not like the 
misgovernments we were dwelling upon a 
little ago, but hard enough to convince a 
thinker that the difference is not fatally against 
the practicability of his theory. American farm- 
ers are not like the fellahs of Egypt, the serfs 
of Russia, and the ryots of India. Nothing 
less than a regression, intellectual, moral, gov- 
ernmental, to the condition of power and slav- 
ery prevalent in India under the rajahs, and 
Burma under her merciless kings, could make 
possible, on our soil, a policy of discriminative 
injustice and class helotage long since out- 
grown by most civilized and by all Christian 
nations. 

8. There is a fnarked peculiarity in our au- 
thor s habit of thought. It is what the Ger- 



54 Regress and Slavery 

mans call an intense mind. Collaterals and 
sequences have no weight. Having espoused a 
theory, every thing must give it right of way. 
It becomes a^ sort of double-ender which runs 
one way as well as another. This idiosyncrasy 
crops out again and again. As a sample see 
page 100. The theory of Malthus is under 
fierce attack. Mr. George must prove that in- 
crease of population does not diminish the 
relative supply of sustenance, and this is one of 
the ways he does it : " Increase of descendants 
does not show increase of population. It 
could only do this when the breeding was in 
and in. Smith and his wife have a son and 
daughter, who marry some one else's daughter 
and son, and each have two children. Smith 
and his wife would thus have four grandchil- 
dren, but there would be in the one generation 
no greater number than in the other — each 
child would have four grandparents. And, 
supposing this process to go on, the line of 
descent might constantly spread out into hun- 
dreds, thousands, millions, but in each genera- 
tion of descendants there would be no more 



vs. ''Progress and Poverty." 55 

individuals than in any previous generation of 
ancestors." 

The hypothesis — without stopping to inquire 
about its pertinence — is novel and astounding. 
If it is luminous to the reader I congratulate 
him. Is there a law limiting the propagation 
of the species to this two-and-two arrange- 
ment? Suppose Smith's son and daughter 
should have ten children each, how would the 
figures stand? Henry Ward Beecher said it 
interested him less to learn whether he de- 
scended from an ape than to know how far he 
had got from the ancestral starting-point. 
The puzzle with me is to divine, on such a 
genealogical basis, how we ever got so far from 
Adam, and especially how there came to be 
so many Smiths in the world. 

The same habitude carries itself into a vari- 
ety of cases. Collaterals are ignored, and the 
good of whatever the author opposes is to him 
an unknown quantity. He thinks he sees 
clearly that land bought with capital should 
be taxed, but capital derived from land should 
be exempt ; that bonds or greenbacks loaned 



$6 Regress and Slavery 

on interest should be exempt, but land bought 
with bonds or greenbacks should be taxed to 
the full amount of the rent it will bring ; that 
tenement-houses, crops, banks, mills, should be 
exempt, but the land on which the crops and 
timber grew and the stone was quarried and 
the iron mined should bear all the burdens of 
government ; that a paralytic or a widow who 
owns a little farm, the rent of which is his or 
her only support, should turn all that rent into 
the public treasury to pay for governmental 
protection of palaces of luxury, marts of busi- 
ness, public baths, theaters, playgrounds, 
dance-halls, for landless millionaires and loaf- 
ing tramps, mechanics, merchants, and dudes, 
on whom no burden, not even a head-tax, is 
to be laid. 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 57 



EIGHTH PAPER. 

A SIMILAR Ophthalmia shows itself in much 
that is said about corporations, monopolies, 
and protective duties. On pages 369, 370 we 
learn that " there are also the onerous monop- 
olies alluded to in Chapter IV of Book III, 
which result from the aggregation of capital in 
businesses w^hich are of the nature of monopo- 
lies. But while it would be extremely diffi- 
cult, if not altogether impossible, to lay taxes 
by general law so that they would fall exclu- 
sively on the returns of such monopoly, and 
not become taxes on production and exchange, 
it is much better that these monopolies should 
be abolished. The reason that residents of 
Nevada are compelled to pay as much freight 
from the East as though their goods were 
carried to San Francisco and back again is 
that the authority which prevents extortion 
on the part of a hack-driver is not exercised in 



58 Regress and Slavery 

respect to a railroad company. It may be said 
generally that businesses which are in their 
nature monopolies are properly part of the 
function of the State." 

Again, with respect to the privileges granted 
to corporations, Mr. George says on pages 173, 
174: " It is a power of the same kind as that 
which James granted to Buckingham, and it is 
often exercised with as reckless a disregard, not 
only of the industrial, but of the personal, rights 
of individuals. A railroad approaches a small 
town as a highwayman approaches his victim. 
The threat that ' if you do not accede to our 
terms we will leave your town two or three 
miles to one side ' is as efficacious as a ' stand and 
deliver,' when the threat of the railroad company 
is not merely to deprive the town of the bene- 
fits which the railroad might give ; it is to put 
it in a far worse position than if no railroad 
had been built. . . . And just as robbers unite 
to plunder in concert and divide the spoil, so 
do the trunk lines of railroads unite to raise 
rates and pool their earnings, or the Pacific 
roads form a combination with the Pacific Mail 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 59 

Steamship Company by which toll-gates are 
virtually established on land and ocean. And 
just as Buckingham's creatures, under author- 
ity of the gold-thread patent, searched private 
houses and seized papers and persons for pur- 
poses of lust and extortion, so does the great 
telegraph company, which, by the power of 
associated capital, deprives the people of the 
United States of the full benefit of a beneficent 
invention, tamper with correspondence and 
crush out newspapers which offend it." Yet 
this oppressive associated capital must remain 
forever untaxed ! 

Mr. George is as much displeased with cus- 
toms and protection as with railroad and steam- 
ship corporations. Strangely enough, he seems 
to see that the farmer class, on whom and 
other land-owners he proposes to lay the entire 
pecuniary burdens of government, are cruelly 
wronged by the encouragement given to home 
manufactures by protection. 

To all this it is just to answer: 

I. Great enterprises demand co-operation 
of forces and combinations of capital. These 



6o Regress and Slavery 

are the "power," and all that is asked of gov- 
ernment is liberty to exercise the power on 
some portion of the public domain. Such hb- 
erty granted to corporations does not constitute 
them monopolies, unless others are " prohib- 
ited under severe penalties," as in the case of 
Buckingham's gold-thread monopoly, from 
forming similar combinations for similar pur- 
poses. The rights granted to corporations by 
our government do not include such restric- 
tions. A railroad, therefore, is no more a 
monopoly than a turnpike. Government, in 
any and every case, has power to fix the rate 
of toll, the price of donated land, etc. On a 
smaller scale, but on the same underlying prin- 
ciple, the first blacksmith's shop or grist-mill 
is a monopoly, by consequence of being first in 
the field. 

2. These improved mediums of transporta- 
tion and commerce leave the old ways open to 
all who prefer them. The impatient and com- 
plaining are free to ship their goods around 
the Horn, cross the plains on muleback, and 
send their messages by mail as aforetime. 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 6i 

3. The " robbery " of towns is not always 
a stand-and-deliver process. More than once 
I have known small towns to refuse or charge 
exorbitantly for right of way, and then curse 
the corporation roundly for running by on the 
outside. As to freight charges, they are some- 
times regulated by the labor and expense of 
discharging. A man in Nevada, for instance, 
sends East for a barrel of oatmeal from Akron, 
a box of soap from Chicago, and a bundle of 
buggy-spokes from Omaha, and can see no rea- 
son why a train cannot stop in front of his little 
way-side store, overhandle two or three car- 
loads of freight and leave his packages, and 
raves because they are carried on to the ter- 
minus and sent back by return train with full 
charges. There may have been real instances 
of carelessness and injustice ; but many assumed 
causes of complaint are unthoughtful and pee- 
vish. The old ways are open to the complain- 
ant in every case. 

4. Rates of passage. It cost me four hun- 
dred and twenty-five dollars and twenty-seven 
days of seasickness to come to California. Yet 



62 Regress and Slavery 

I accounted the Isthmus a great improvement 
on the Cape Horn route and the plains. Now 
we cross the plains in five days in an elegant 
drawing-room on wheels, at a cost of a hun- 
dred or so dollars. That I must pronounce a 
still greater gain to both comfort and purse. 
If any prefer the earlier way, it is a free 
country. 

5. I wish to communicate with New York 
in an emergency. Valuable interests are at 
stake. The mail will carry my message in a 
week, the telegraph will send it in five minutes. 
There is a gain of eighty-six hundred and thirty- 
five minutes. It is optional with me to use the 
one or the other. 

'* But," it is urged, " the government ought 
to own all these things, and then — " Then 
what ? Would trains and steamships and tele- 
graph run by magic if the government owned 
them ? Comparison shows that governmental 
management is more expensive than private, 
as a rule, the world over. Then, too, there 
would be no competition and no stimulus to 
^private enterprise to expedite business and 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 63 

reduce rates. No short roads would be run for 
convenience of localities, and endless local 
jealousies would attend every line of national 
improvement. 

" But do you not see that land-owners are to 
furnish funds for all these public conveniences ? " 
So, so. And then the landless and the lazy may 
ride, roll, travel, dispatch, dance, and bathe 
twelve hours a day, and not a dime to pay ! 
Will not that be glorious ? 

6. It usually happens that private enter- 
prise outruns official tardiness and red tape — 
as in the case of the corporations denounced 
by Mr. George — much to the advantage of the 
commonwealth. Take the Union and Central 
Pacific roads, constituting our transcontinental 
line, as a sample, and reflect upon the circum- 
stances under which it was built. It appeared 
likely to prove a vital condition of national self- 
protection. Indeed, it might prove so in any 
crisis. But the government was not in a spirit 
to inaugurate or a condition to prosecute such 
a work, neither is there a shadow of probability 
that it would have been as quickly or inexpen- 



64 Regress and Slavery 

sively done, if done at all. It was undertaken 
at great risk to its projectors, and prosecuted 
with an energy scarcely paralleled in history. 
Its projectors were not men of large wealth, 
but of far-sightedness and indomitable cour- 
age. It was to traverse wide unsettled regions 
which had no appreciable value and could yield 
no commerce except as the road might create 
it, and was to surmount mountain chains which 
would have terrified more timid natures. They 
risked every thing, even life itself — as in a 
notable instance in the career of Charles Crocker 
— to do a work which assured and enriched the 
nation far beyond its cost. Yet that it was 
not and is not a monopoly is demonstrated by 
the fact that competing lines already stretch 
from ocean to ocean. 



vs, " Progress and Poverty." 65 



NINTH PAPER. 

7. The field was an open one. Mr. George 
and I had as much right to build a road as 
Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins. 
And we had nearly as much money, for all 
they had was a bagatelle compared with the 
expense to be incurred. What we lacked was 
foresight, faith, courage, and possibly clear- 
sighted patriotism. It does not impress me 
as generous or just to denounce them because 
they outsaw and outgeneraled us. Courage 
and faith were needed. I well remember when 
groups of men used to stand on the streets in 
Sacramento and laugh loud and long at *' the 
blamed fools who thought they were going to 
run a railroad over the tops of the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains." 

8. In a word, whatever evitable or inevita- 
ble injury it may have wrought in exceptional 

cases, it is only just to concede that the bene- 
5 



66 Regress and Slavery 

fits to the State by the railroad a thousand 
times outweigh the real or imaginary harm. 
And it is to be regretted that the loose and 
reasonless clamor raised by pessimists and 
demagogues, and echoed by the thriftless and 
shallow-thinking, should be emboldened by the 
one-sided and ejir cathedra pronouncements of 
so able and influential a man as the author of 
Progress and Poverty. Would the country or 
one man in it be better off if the road had not 
been built ? Take a case as a sample of the 
prevalent ructation, and also of the injury 
done to farmers by the road. In one of our 
large valleys a not over thrifty farmer was 
cursing the railroad corporation as a grinding 
monopoly. A by-stander said : 

"• I would not live under such tyranny. Sell 
out and leave. What will you take for your 
farm ? " 

He must have thirty-five dollars an acre if 
he sold, but he didn't care to sell. 

*' What was your land worth before the rail- 
road came ? " 

*' Wal, about five dollars." 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 6/ 

" That is one way the cruel road has crushed 
you. Now, what else has it done ? The 
guilty wretches of this heartless corporation 
have killed your mules, haven't they ? " 

Why, no, they hadn't. 

" Well, they have burned your wagons ?" 

No, of course they hadn't. 

" Surely, now, they have torn up and de- 
stroyed all your wagon roads ? " 

Pshaw, no, they hadn't done any such 
thing. 

" Then I'll tell you what to do. Just load 
your grain into your wagons and haul it to 
market as you used to. And when you wish 
to go to San Francisco saddle your horse — 
don't count the horse or your own time any 
thing — make the trip in five days, and pay 
about three times as much as it costs you now 
to get into a car at eleven o'clock P. M., go to 
the city, transact your business, and get home 
for tea next day, with lodging included in your 
fare. True, it will not be nearly as cheap, 
comfortable, and expeditious, but you will 
show that you are a free American citizen and 



68 Regress and Slavery 

don't propose to be crushed by the iron heel 
of a soulless monopoly." 

The man looked foolish, but I presume he is 
still denouncing the wicked corporation as 
often as any are lazy or sympathetic enough to 
stop to listen. 

9. Mr. George's resentment against the 
policy of protection is as pronounced as against 
railroads. He thinks he sees how small farm- 
ers especially are robbed by the tariff which 
encourages home manufacture. 

Many thoughtful persons judge differently. 
As a class small farmers are small purchasers 
of foreign goods. It appears to many men of 
sound mind that a hungry home market is 
most stable and most profitable. It is cer- 
tainly most convenient. Such a market results 
from a balancing of industries under which 
manufactories hold their place and rightful 
share in the prevalent industrial economy, thus 
bringing demand door to door with supply. 
Many wise men think that national independ- 
ence and readiness for emergencies depend on 
national sufficiency of indigenous resources, 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 69 

and that general thrift and prosperity result 
from the harmony and interplay thus encour- 
aged. 

One who studies the destitution of the South 
during the great civil war — a destitution at- 
tributable to the lack of manufactories — will 
learn a lesson from facts worth a thousand 
theories. Possibly the devotees of free trade 
may think, like Stephenson about the cow, that 
if facts stand in the way of their favorite theory 
it will be so much the worse for the facts ; but 
it will not harm any of us to treat respectfully 
the holders of opposite opinions. 



70 Regress and Slavery 



TENTH PAPER. 

" Progress and Poverty " ignores, or but 
family hints at, the only remedy which can har- 
monize distribution with want and siveep the 
earth clear of injustice, greed, oppression, Jteglect, 
and hunger. 

To dream that certain legislative and eco- 
nomic adjustments would rid the race of its 
woes is but to dream. Such a fancy discredits 
history and covers human nature with obliv- 
iousness. Common ownership of land has been 
tried and found wanting. It was tried in 
Plymouth and failed. It was tried in Virginia 
and failed. It was tried at New Harmony and 
failed. It was tried at Mixville, N. Y., and 
failed. It was tried at Brook Farm, under the 
( gifted Fourier, and failed. It is being tried 
in the poor, dry-rot colony of Acraria and is a 
failure. It has failed every-where. They soon 
discovered that, as in Virginia, many " worked 



vs. ''Progress and Poverty." 71 

lazily and ate industriously." Private owner- 
ship was and is the lesson and the remedy 
commended by experience. 

A handful of Shakers, as at Harrodsburg, 
Ky., holds itself together by religious bonds 
and numerical insignificance, but the Friend 
Quakers, for whom I ought to cherish a filial 
reverence, are compelled to adhere to individ- 
ual ownership. Just now a commanding con- 
viction engages the public mind that land in 
severalty — that is, private ownership — for the 
Indians on reservations would be a marked im- 
provement on the present policy. Such an 
arrangement accords with sound philosophy 
and the lessons of a world-wide experience. 

To put land, mines, railroads, telegraphs, un- 
der control of government would be a freak of 
madness. What is our government? There 
are four words which Mr. George has a habit 
of using interchangeably. They are We, State, 
Government, Community. '' We " have a right 
to take all ; the " State" has a right to take 
all; the "Government " has a right to take 
all ; the " Community " has a right to take all. 



72 Regress and Slavery 

Things equal to the same thing are equal to 
one another. But what is this multinomen, 
functionally considered? It is Smith, Brown, 
Jones, O'Reilly, and Spookenstaver, who have 
managed to get themselves elected to leg- 
islative, judicial, and executive offices for a 
term. That election does not confer infallibil- 
ity is sadly demonstrated by the laws which 
they make, amend, repeal, break, contradicto- 
rily interpret, and capriciously enforce. Could 
a body of men capable of repealing the Sunday 
laws — the laborer's only legal defense against 
the exactions of greed and the oppressions of 
power — for the votes of the slums and the 
prurience of partisan victory ; or such a legisla- 
ture as our last in California, which appeared 
to act the role of the false watchman within 
opening the door for bigger thieves without 
to reach the public treasury — could such a body, 
I say, be intrusted with the immense power 
and patronage for which Mr. George contends. 
Doubtless many civil officers are able and 
upright, but the mixture, the changeableness, 
the partisan heat, and the irrepressible uncer- 



vs. '* Progress and Poverty." 73 

tainty of politics are too great to leave room 
for so egregious a confidence. 

To seek intelligently for a cure we must first 
know the cause of the disease. To ascribe vice, 
poverty, degradation, and crime to private 
ownership of land, we have seen, and may 
every-where see, is naked and ludicrous as- 
sumption. In the same social grade, the same 
trade, the same place of residence, the same 
environments, there are always found instances 
of thrift and comfort side by side with squalor, 
filth, and wretchedness. Even in London, 
where poverty and vice are supposed to seethe 
and swelter as almost nowhere else, the rule 
holds that " every man is the architect of his 
own fortune." I quote from one who knows as 
well as any living man whereof he writes : 

" I would not say hard words against poverty ; 
wherever it comes it is bitter to all ; but you 
will mark, as you notice carefully, that a few 
are poor because of unavoidable circumstances. 
A very large share of the poverty of London 
is the sheer and clear result of profuseness, 
want of forethought, idleness, and, worst of all, 



74 Regress and Slavery 

drunkenness. Ah, that drunkenness ! that is 
the master-evil. If drink could be got rid of 
we might be sure of conquering the devil 
himself. The drunkenness created by the in- 
fernal liquor-dens which plague-spot the whole 
of this huge city is appalling. No ; I did not 
speak in haste or let slip a hasty word. Many 
of the drink-houses are nothing less than infer- 
nal. In some respects they are even worse, 
for hell has its use as a divine protest against 
sin ; but as for the gin-palace, there is nothing 
to be said in its favor. The vices of the age 
cause three fourths of its poverty. If you 
could look at the houses to-night, the wretched 
homes where women will tremble at the sound 
of their husband's foot as he comes home, 
where little children will crouch down with 
fear upon their little beds of straw, because 
the human brute, who calls himself ' a man * 
will come reeling home from the palace where 
he has been indulging his appetite — if you 
could look at such a sight, and remember it 
will be seen ten thousand times over to-night, 
I think you would say, * God help us by all 



vs. " Progress and Poverty/' 75 

means to save some ! ' Since the great ax to lay 
at the foot of this deadly upas-tree is the Gos- 
pel of Christ, may God help us to hold that 
ax there, and to work constantly with it, till 
the huge trunk of the poison-tree begins to 
rock to and fro, and we get it down, and Lon- 
don is saved from wretchedness and misery 
which now drip from every bough." 

The fact that one man owns land does not 
make another man drunken and devilish. Mr. 
George's sovereign "remedy" is about as 
pertinent as the sum of a budding genius in 
the district school : " If a peck of 'beans cost 
nine pence, how far is it around a tremendously 
big brush-heap ? " If " the vices of the age 
cause three fourths of the poverty " (and that 
estimate is below the mark), strike at the 
vices — drunkenness, gambling, the house of 
the strange woman, " whose steps take hold 
on hell." 

We punish a man for being drunk. Pun- 
ish the men who make him drunk as well. We 
inflict heavy penalties upon one who burns 
houses, sells tainted meat or impure milk, then 



'j6 Regress AND Slavery 

license another to poison and despoil and turn 
the homes of his patrons into hell-prisons where 
the demonized *^ master " is police, judge, jury, 
jailer, and executioner. And Mr. George pro- 
poses to cure all this infernal array of deadly 
blunders and dire distress with the single tax ! 
Inconsequently enough, the able author of 
Progress and Poverty constructs of the evasions, 
concealments, and outright lying of possessors 
of other kinds of wealth an argument for laying 
the whole burden of government upon land- 
owners. Thus on pages 374, 375 : " The gross 
corruptions and fraud occasioned in the United 
States by the whisky and tobacco taxes are 
well known ; the constant undervaluations of 
the custom-house, the ridiculous untruthful- 
ness of income-tax returns, and the absolute 
impossibility of getting any thing like a just 
valuation of personal property are matters of 
notoriety. . . . Taxes which lack the item of 
certainty tell most fearfully upon morals. Our 
revenue laws as a body might well be entitled, 
* Acts to promote the corruption of public 
officials, to suppress honesty and encourage 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 77 

fraud, to set a premium upon perjury and the 
subornation of perjury, and to divorce the 
idea of law from the idea of justice.' . . . The 
tax on land values, which is the least arbitrary 
of taxes, possesses in the highest degree the 
element of certainty. It may be assessed and 
collected with a definiteness that partakes of 
the immovable and unconcealable character of 
the land itself. Taxes levied on land may be 
collected to the last cent." 

All which amounts to this : Five men are 
individually in my debt. One has bonds, one 
greenbacks, one a valuable patent-right, a 
fourth a clipper-ship, and the fifth a farm. The 
first conceals his bonds, the second belies his 
greenbacks, the third's patent is unattachable, 
the fourth sends his ship to Europe, the fifth — 
unlucky fellow! — cannot pocket his farm or 
falsify the county records ; so I demand that 
he shall pay his own debt and the debts of the 
four rascals who are cheating me out of my 
honest dues. 

One to five may not exactly state the rela- 
tive number of land-owners as compared with 



78 Regress and Slavery 

non-owners, but exactness is not necessary to 
the point of the hypothesis. France has eight 
millions, which I infer includes only actual 
tillers of their own acres. These agriculturists 
and horticulturists are the keystone of the 
economic arch, the spinal column of the nation's 
patriotic strength. It is true of every country 
that the people attached to the soil by actual 
ownership have the most stable patriotism. 
Our population is flowing disproportionately 
into the cities. Probably the incoming census 
returns will show actual farmers in less propor- 
tion than in France, for the reason that 
machinery is more used here than there to 
augment the productiveness of labor. Does 
any man imagine that the eight millions, with 
the added owners of city lots in France, could 
be compelled, without bloody revolution, to 
defray all the current expenses of the State 
and provide luxuries for the miUions of non- 
holding people ? Yet it would be far easier to 
reach such a result there than here. 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 79 



ELEVENTH PAPER. 

Profit-sharing is a beneficent expedient 
which philanthropic individuals here and there 
are trying with success. Since 1878 a number 
of firms have adopted it as a stroke at once of 
poHcy and of justice ; among them the Pillsbury 
flour-mills of Minneapolis, Wanamaker in 
Philadelphia, the Century Magazine, the Staats- 
Zeiticng, the Deering manufactory of agricult- 
ural implements in Chicago, Lewis Miller & 
Co., of Akron and Canton, O., and Proctor & 
Gamble in Cincinnati. 

For more than thirty years a few houses in 
France, Sweden, and Germany have practiced 
this method with much satisfaction to all par- 
ties concerned. But profit-sharing must be 
left to individual impulse and honor. It can- 
not be governmentally instituted or enforced. 
The general adoption of such a scheme can be 
brought about only by some power that shall 



8o Regress and Slavery 

profoundly influence individual life and char- 
acter. 

It must needs be such a power as changed 
the imperious persecutor, Saul of Tarsus, into 
a fervent, tireless, self-forgetting toiler for the 
uplifting of the helpless, the hopeless, the 
heathen; such a p"bwer as placed John New- 
ton, the slave-merchant — "the man-stealer," 
as he used to call himself — among the sleepless 
haters of all oppression ; such a power as begot 
in the hearts of the cannibals of Fiji a sym- 
pathy so tender and a benevolence so uncal- 
culating that nowhere in all the world are 
shipwrecked sailors more bravely rescued or 
kindly treated than on their coral-bound 
coasts ; a power such as transformed bloody 
John Adams and his fellow-mutineers of the 
Bounty, with the wild women they picked up 
on the islands, into a model community, or- 
derly, chaste, unselfish, morally heroic, till 
Pitcairn became one of the ethical light-houses 
of the ocean. 

If similar evolutions could every-where pre- 
vail every man would be every man's brother. 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 8i 

The astute would befriend the dull, the strong 
the weak, the learned the illiterate, the well 
th^ sick, the rich the poor, as no legislation or 
tax scheme could ever make them do. Help 
would be instant, hearty, ample. To make 
such a condition actual the millions must be 
brought up to the experience which the ten thou- 
sands have exhibited. Enough have appeared, 
as samples, amply to prove the attainableness 
of so beneficent a spirit, so that the possibility 
has passed beyond debate. It is a postulate 
that the power which made new men of Saul, 
Newton, Michael Varyana, and King Tom is 
adequate to universal efficiency, if it could be 
brought to bear. 

It is both history and philosophy that the 
ethical and spiritual forces which lift men the- 
oretically and by conviction out of the deep 
grooves of selfishness must arise from some 
underlying religious faith. This ought not to 
appear anomalous, for every civilization within 
the reach of historic, traditional, and anti- 
quarian research has rested on a substructure 
of religion from which the moral element in 



82 Regress and Slavery 

its laws, sentiments, and customs flowed. The 
character of the civilization has been deter- 
mined by the quality of the religious basis. 
Hence a weak religious system has sustained a 
dubious and unprogressive civilization ; and 
whenever the progress of a people has ex- 
hausted the ethical upflow stagnation or re- 
trogression has followed. This has been true 
of the old pagan civilizations for a thousand 
years. A limitlessly progressive civilization 
must be nourished by an undergirding religion 
whose ethical supply can never be exhausted.' 

But one such religion is known. But one 
such is needed. The ripest fruit of the old 
book religions is " the golden rule of Confu- 
cius," which is negative, timid, selfish, and 
provides only for the do-nothing side of our 
life. A man may be the veriest churl, shutting 
himself within himself, never doing a noble or 
humane deed from the cradle to the cofifin, and 
keep the Confucian rule. The positive doing 
side it leaves wholly unfurnished. 

An economy of instruction and uplifting suf- 
ficient to harmonize liberality with need on a 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 83 

universal scale must embrace these four partic- 
ulars : 

1. A correct theory of life. 

2. An adequate motive power. 

3. A reconstructive or regenerative power 
strong enough to overcome natural inertia and 
self-seeking. 

4. The economy of life and provision of 
power must be clearly set forth in available 
form and diligently propagated by the recip- 
ients of the resulting benefit. 

I. There is such a theory of life, 

John Adams and the mutineers learned, it 
from an old book picked out of a seaman's 
chest. The Fijians read it in the same book. 
Thousands of thousands have gleaned the 
lesson from the same source. To that book 
we shall do well that we take heed as unto a 
light that shineth in a dark place. It is not 
the Shastras, the Zend Avesta, The Book of 
Mormon^ nor The Light of Asia, The book 
to which I allude is as perfectly suited to this 
age as though intended for no other, and to 
every man as thought studiously written for 



84 Regress and Slavery 

him alone. The sage and the savage, the Ka- 
fir and the Hottentot, the Bushman and the 
" red-browed forest ranger," all find in this one 
volume perfect portraitures, profound needs, 
and adequate supplies. 

Here are samples of the practical lessons of 
the book — a few of its broad rules of life : The 
end of the commandment is love. Let love 
be without dissimulation. Love is the fulfill- 
ing of the law. Love worketh no ill to his 
neighbor, therefore it is the fulfilling of the law. 
Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the 
poor that are cast out to thy house. Visit the 
Avidow and fatherless in their affliction. Devise 
not evil against thy neighbor, nor take up a 
reproach against him. That which is alto- 
gether just shalt thou do. Thou shalt not de- 
fraud thy neighbor. The wages of him that is 
hired shall not abide with thee all night until 
the morning. Do good to them that hate you. 
If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If there be 
any other commandment it is briefly compre- 
hended in this, namely. Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. Whatsoever ye would 



vs. '' Progress and Poverty." 85 

that men should do to you, do ye even so to 
them. 

II. There is no adequate motivity, 
I. The doctrine of immortality. We shall 
meet again and remember. When James C. 
Jones, the most accomplished governor that 
ever honored Tennessee (and that is saying 
much) went down from the little farm to 
Pulaski in butternut-colored jeans some sons 
of rich men sneered and pointed fingers. 
They met him again when he held listening 
thousands captivated, spell-bound by his won- 
derful eloquence; and while rich and poor 
pressed forward for the honor of taking his 
hand the poor creatures remembered and 
slunk away. There is mighty inspiration to 
good and mighty restraint of evil in a belief in 
immortality. A distinguished editor of a sec- 
ular journal, still throned on the tripod, said 
to the students of our university, '' You might 
as well attempt to make a passion-flower out 
of a cabbage-stalk as any thing grand and no- 
ble out of men who have no faith in a future 
life." 



86 Regress and Slavery 

2. Brotherhood is another element in the tre- 
mendous motive force. It is the special plead- 
ing of prejudice, and not the dictum of a broad 
and ripe anthropology, which denies that 
" God hath made of one blood all nations of 
men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.'* 
" Love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous." 
"Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his 
brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels 
of compassion from him, how dwelleth the 
love of God in him ? " ** Whosoever hateth his 
brother is a murderer." Such are a few of the 
fair inferences and incentives drawn from 
brotherhood. 

3. Gratitude and example. One of the world's 
heroes, whose grand life and superb powers 
were consecrated to the purest philanthropy, 
who sacrificed fame and riches, and endured 
hunger, stripes, shipwrecks, dungeons, and 
death for the Master whom he served, left on 
record this sufficient explanation : " The love 
of Christ constraineth us; because we thus 
judge, that if one died for all, then were all 
dead : and that he died for all, that they which 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 87 

live should not henceforth live unto them- 
selves, but unto him which died for them, and 
rose again." The inference is full of pathos 
and power : " If he laid down his life for us, 
we ought to be willing to lay down our lives 
for the brethren." Gratitude is the noblest in- 
gredient in rational happiness, and the strong- 
est incentive to benevolent activity. Let the 
truth get commanding possession of any man 
that One bore his sicknesses and carried his 
sorrows, was bruised for his iniquities and 
wounded for his transgressions, chastised for 
his peace and crucified for his redemption, 
and let him realize that this glorious Being 
wishes him for his sake to feed the hungry, 
comfort the sorrowing, shield the endangered, 
and rescue the lost, and every energy of life 
will be set in motion. Labor will no longer 
prove a load nor duty seem a task. 

4. Rewards, The All-Father treats us ac- 
cording to the laws of our nature. If he calls 
us to a mission of sacrifice he holds before us 
a ** recompense of reward," under the incite- 
ment of which a young man of rarest gifts, 



88 Regress and Slavery 

the greatest statesman of the race, adopted 
into royal heirship and in sight of a throne, 
turned from crown and scepter to associate 
with slaves and lead a thankless people through 
weary years of desert life, die alone, and sleep 
in an unmonumented grave. Here is the solv- 
ent of the mystery of consecrated lives. Here 
is the exegesis of the lesson : ** He that loveth 
not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God whom he hath not seen?" Here 
we recognize the obeyableness of the com- 
mand that "he that loveth God love his 
brother also.'* 

The reward is gracious, not equivalent; 
a divinely royal bounty, not an arithmetical 
price. The order of the government is this: 
To them who by patient continuance in well- 
doing seek for glory, honor, and incorruption, 
God will recompense eternal life. 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 89 



TWELFTH PAPER. 

III. There is regenerative power to harmon- 
ize mind and heart with rule and motive. 

It is not our own will, though that must be 
consenting. It is not self-discipline, though 
that has its uses. It is not the help of men or 
angels, though sympathy, human or angelic, is 
grateful. It is not psychical, for the intellect 
may be intensely alive and the ideality per- 
fect, yet the man remain selfish, sordid, sensual, 
devilish, spiritually dead. 

He only who fashioned the eye can fathom 
the mysteries of life and lift lapsed humanity 
out of derangement and diseased proclivity 
into a new life, the broken spring mended, the 
lost balance restored, and a new law written in 
the members. 

That a transforming power exists is placed 
beyond dispute by numberless instances of its 
wonder-working. It lifts the fierce into gen- 



90 Regress and Slavery 

tleness, the arrogant into meekness, the proud 
into humility, the self-seeking into self-forget- 
fulness. It has achieved this change among 
men of all tongues, ranks, colors, ages. It 
has wrought the change among thousands of 
thousands; it is doing it among thousands of 
thousands now. I am not now asking you to 
concede the divineness of the record, but you 
will have to admit the force of facts. Peace 
has come to disordered homes and love-rest 
to troubled hearts through this power. Rea- 
son about it as we will, its nature, origin, 
modus y it is self-proved, witnessed by unim- 
peachable and overwhelming testimony. It is 
too obvious for argument that the Power 
which molded the fierce Fijian man-eater 
into a meek preacher of righteousness, set 
King Tom in calm and fearless opposition to 
the fetichism and all the abominations of his 
own and surrounding tribes, and transformed 
the bloody Tsimshean Indians into an indus- 
trious and loving Christian community now at 
Metlahkahtla is able to *'make the Ethiop 
white." 



vs. "Progress and Poverty." 91 

A full revelation of this grand scheme of 
reform is found in one book only. Christmas 
Evans found it there, and there the Fingo 
finds it — a book which promotes every possible 
virtue and discourages every possible vice. 
Unlike the thirty yards of the books of Bud- 
dhism, this volume teaches by principles as 
broad as the domain of human life and plain 
enough to be understood by wayfaring men. 
It is a book that invites criticism and chal- 
lenges competition ; that furnishes every man 
in every emergency with the wisest of lessons 
and the most wholesome of motives, and is 
perfectly fitted to the needs of every stage of 
civilization. Concerning this volume Sir Wal- 
ter Scott said, "There is but one book." 
Happy the homes in which its lessons are 
devoutly studied! Happy the country in 
whose schools and courts it is recognized as 
the one authority in morals ! 



92 Regress and Slavery 



GENERAL RESULTS. 

I RESPECTFULLY submit that we have fairly- 
reached the following conclusions : 

1. That Mr. George's patent definitions do 
not in any degree modify the actual issues of 
things, nor in any measure support his high 
single-tax theory. 

2. That the distinction he makes as to 
rightfulness of ownership, between the prod- 
ucts of labor expended on land and that ex- 
pended otherwise, indicates imperfect knowl- 
edge and leads to crude generalizations. 

3. That the assumption that private own- 
ership of land is the cause of the ignorance, 
poverty, degradation, and vice which we de- 
plore is too false to be presented as fact and 
too thin to be offered as hypothesis. 

4. That a functional government, ruled by 
ballots and administered by political parties, 
would be rent asunder by an attempt to in- 
augurate the single-tax scheme. 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 93 

5. That the government would be slower 
and less distributive and more expensive than 
private enterprise in building improvements. 

6. That political revolutions and provincial 
jealousies would be created by every attempt 
of the government to improve one section 
rather than another. 

7. That in attempting to avoid the ** shock " 
liable to attend his scheme of reform by con- 
ceding perpetual retention and management, 
with power to sell, will, rent, and devise un- 
limited bodies of land now in possession or 
yet to be possessed, Mr. George takes the 
spinal marrow out of his whole scheme and 
greatly aggravates any evils which are liable 
to lead to the oppression of the hireling in his 
wages. 

8. That his ** True Remedy," the single tax, 
is retrogressive, unstatesmanlike, unjust, im- 
politic, one-eyed, impudent, outrageous, and 
can never be carried into effect among a free 
and self-respecting people. The fundamental 
industry which feeds the nation and makes all 
other industries possible, will never submit to 



94 Regress and Slavery 

the enormous and insane proposition until the 
forms and the very name of free government 
are obsolescent and the spirit of liberty ex- 
pires. 

9. As I see it, no self-respecting American 
citizen capable of comprehending relations and 
foreseeing consequences will for a moment 
tolerate the thought of desiring, or will consent 
to receive, his safety and sustenance at the ex- 
pense of others. Every honest man prefers 
to pay his own bills. The good God grant 
that the spirit of robbery and mendicity may 
always be foreign on American soil ! 

10. Authentic Christianity, as a social and 
experimental force, will yield all that is benef- 
icent in economics, all that is loyal in citizen- 
ship, all that is faithful in domestic relations, 
all that is just in business, all that is liberal 
in benevolence, all that is generous in senti- 
ment, all that is magnanimous in judg- 
ment, all that is brave in righteousness, 
all that is noble in manhood. It is therefore 
the One Remedy for which piety should pray 
and patriotism labor, and courage dare, and 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 95 

zeal proclaim, and faith "lend its realizing 
light." But it must be the genuine article. 
No sham, no counterfeit, no make-believe, no 
necromantic pudding of admixture will serve. 
Veritable Christliness perfectly answers to the 
high demand. It will solve the labor problem, 
purge social impurity, cure laziness, quench 
greed, and give to every man who opens wide 
his heart and understanding to its sway a 
brother's hand of help. Until then — until 
law enters into life — life will evade law. 

II. Therefore, missing, as it does, philoso- 
phy, justice, and regenerative power ; ignoring, 
as it does, the lessons of history and vast ex- 
perience ; ignoring, as it does, the forecasting 
of consequences ; assuming, as it does, what it 
was impossible to prove ; and arguing, as it 
does, on false and impertinent premises ; en- 
couraging, as it does, irrational and falsely ex- 
plained discontent ; stimulating, as it does, 
class hatred and feculent thoughts of confisca- 
tion and spoliation ; and striking, as it does, at 
the fundamental industry which is the tap- 
root of national prosperity, the scheme of 



96 Regress and Slavery 

Progress and Poverty should henceforth wear 
the truer label, REGRESS AND Slavery. 

Undergirding principles of well-ordered 
life which are contravened, infracted, or ig- 
nored by the single-tax theory : 

1. The free play of individuality, under the 
stimulus of personal accountability and the 
restraints of justice and the claims of brother- 
hood, is essential to the highest type of civili- 
zation and the most exalted and efficacious 
development of religion. 

2. Agriculture is the fundamental industry 
on which all prosperity rests, and the ownership 
in fee simple of a home is promotive of the 
home-loves and homely virtues which are vital 
to patriotism. Any policy which tends to 
degrade the one and discourage the other is 
detrimental and dangerous in proportion to the 
measure of its popular acceptance. 

3. Any plan of government and law which 
promises the lazy, the selfish, the unthrifty, and 
the unjust an exceptional class to bear the 
financial burdens of civilization for them is a 



vs. " Progress and Poverty." 97 

deep and demoralizing injury to the disbur- 
dened and a cruel injustice to the overburdened. 

4. Any scheme which ignores the inborn 
selfishness of human nature and builds its 
Utopia of universal happiness upon political 
adjustments and human law, ignoring the 
heart- renewing power of God and the Christ- 
born heart-love for Jew and Samaritan, Par- 
thian and Mede, Elamite and Cappadocian, is 
a dream as idle and childish as the vagaries of 
madmen or the drivel of idiots. 

5. Any proposal of reform which attributes 
the poverty and discontent of the dissipated 
and unthrifty to other than their true causes is 
an aggravation of the evil by the false methods 
of the attempted cure. It is poison and pesti- 
lence in the social atmosphere. 

6. Any doctrine which encourages men to 
curse their " misfortune "and dream covetously 
of unearned riches, instead of '* working with 
their hands [and heads] the thing that is 
good," is a mischievous fallacy and a political 
endangerment. 

7. The notion that the only " laboring 



98 Regress and Slavery 

classes" are hand-workers, and that riches ac- 
cumulated by righteous enterprise in develop- 
ing virgin resources are an injury to the " toiling 
masses," is fit only for the distempered brain 
of a paralogist. 

8. The fancy that if the " government " 
owned all lines of public conveyance it could 
run them cheaper, pay better wages, and incur 
less risk of malfeasance and mismanagement 
than competing private corporations is a spec- 
ulation which flies in the face of rational proba- 
bility and the suggestions of experience. Even 
now the clamor for an eight-hour law and 
exceptional wages for all public employment 
has more weight with ** government " and the 
average politician than the sweating brows and 
calloused hands of the uncomplaining whose 
toil, in field and shop and ship and office, must 
pay the unjust and discriminating score. 

9. Any policy of government which pro- 
poses to classify and burden or release useful 
and necessary industries by popular vote is but 
a new modus of tyranny and oppression against 
which authentic manhood cannot fail to revolt. 



vs. '* Progress and Poverty." 99 

10. A sound national policy would offer 
every just inducement to the youth of our free 
country to become owners of homes and tillers 
of the soil, their honest acres being held by a 
title as valid and respectable as that by which 
men hold ships, manufactories, and merchan- 
dise. 



THE END. 



(D>' 



^h 






